It was a very cold morning in North Florida (in the teens/low 20s Fahrenheit) as I walked in to class during my second semester of graduate school. I vaguely recall some concerns about the launch of Challenger that morning because of the cold and I believe it was scrapped once before, this highly-touted launch of America’s first schoolteacher in space.

1986…This was before the ubiquity of the internet and I didn’t have a radio in our small lab. The first I heard of the disaster was while standing on the med center cafeteria lunch line when a visually-impaired gentleman asked me what I thought of the space shuttle event. I thought he was referring to the likelihood that the launch was canceled again.

Instead, a blind man was asking me if I had seen the explosion.

Two of my fellow students who had undergraduate pharmacy degrees were down in Orlando that morning taking the Florida pharmacy boards so they could score some lucrative part-time work to supplement our graduate stipend of $6,600 per year. They could see the somewhat Y-shaped cloud to the east from their exam room resulting from the detonation of the booster rockets.

Afterwards, I recall some criticism that NASA had been pressured to go forward with the launch due to President Reagan’s scheduled State of the Union speech that evening.

I recall Richard Feynman’s famous illustration of a distorted O-ring from his glass of ice water during a press conference of the Rogers Commission investigating the accident.

The Florida DMV issued a memorial license plate with proceeds to go toward education of the children of the astronauts who perished in the disaster. I renewed the plate each year until leaving Florida for my postdoc…and keep it to this day.

Kevin Beck has a more personal and far more literary reflection on the day at the Refuge.

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By the way, I’m a coauthor and protege of Richard Feynman. I also worked on several Space Shuttle safety projects for Rockwell International, and was canned as potential whistleblower. Don’t want to go into that long, horrible story here, as it’s been blogged by me several times over the years. Thank you, Abel Pharmboy, for your memorial.